My Thoughts on Black Phone 2
Black Phone 2 picks up with Finn trying and failing to put the past behind him. although the trauma hasn’t disappeared, it’s just taken a new shape.
He gets into fights, smokes weed, and wears this sort of emotional armor that’s easy to recognize in kids who’ve gone through something unspeakable, and I thought Mason Thames really captured that quiet, angry kind of sadness.
Gwen is still the firecracker she was, but her dreams have grown darker, as they used to help her see the truth, now they’re just pushing her toward madness.
The movie begins by showing that the family, despite everything, has tried to move forward, where their father is sober now who is trying to be better, but he’s still not ready to believe Gwen’s gift is real, and when Gwen’s worsening dreams lead her and Finn to a snow covered Christian youth camp.
The shift to the camp surprised me at first, as it’s a far cry from the dirty basements and claustrophobic hallways of the first movie. The snow gives it all a strange purity, where everything’s white and quiet, but you know something terrible is waiting beneath it.
I like it when horror movies use contrast like that, and there’s something unsettling about placing violence in an innocent setting, and here the camp becomes this eerie place where faith, fear, and family history start colliding.
It’s also where the movie dives deeper into Gwen and Finn’s mother, who, as we learn, shared Gwen’s strange visions., and this was one of the more effective parts of the story, as expanding the family’s backstory gives the sequel some emotional weight beyond just trying to recreate the scares of the first.
In the first film, there were a few casual mentions of Jesus, little touches that made sense for the time and placem but here in the sequel, it becomes a much bigger focus.
Gwen talks about faith a lot, sometimes in the middle of conversations where it feels out of place, and I don’t have a problem with religion being part of a horror story, but the issue here is that it doesn’t feel natural for the characters we got to know in the first film.
It’s as if the movie suddenly wants to make a statement instead of letting the story speak for itself, and because of that push and pull, it does make certain scenes feel forced.
But even so, Black Phone 2 does have some things that really work.
Gwen’s dream sequences are stunning, with Derrickson filming them using Super 8, giving the footage this grainy, nostalgic look similar to what he did in Sinister, but it fits perfectly here because Gwen’s dreams are personal.
They look like home movies gone wrong, and I thought those sequences were the most beautiful parts of the film, where it all adds this sense of something lost and half remembered.
Black Phone 2 also feels larger than its predecessor, which you would probably expect, where the camera moves more, the sets are bigger, and the color palette is overall colder, but not all of it works, as there’s a noticeable amount of CGI snow and digital backgrounds that take away from the isolation the story is trying to create, and it’s a shame because the setting could’ve been one of the movie’s strongest assets.
I did enjoy how the film plays with tone, though, and there are moments where it feels like a coming of age story and others where it’s pure nightmare, and Derrickson knows how to balance those two worlds, at least most of the time, where the relationship between Finn and Gwen anchors everything, as they bicker, protect each other, and carry the same pain in different ways.
You can tell these two kids have been through something together that no one else could understand, and that bond is what makes the movie work emotionally, even when the story itself starts to wobble.
Mason Thames and Madeleine McGraw deserve a lot of credit for keeping that connection alive. Thames has this quiet intensity that makes Finn’s pain believable, and McGraw, even with some uneven dialogue, delivers a performance that’s full of emotion.
She balances Gwen’s sharp tongue with her growing sense of fear and responsibility, and the supporting cast is solid too, as Jeremy Davies brings a soft, broken edge to the father, while Demián Bichir gives a warm, steady performance that grounds some of the stranger scenes, and, of course, Ethan Hawke returns as the Grabber - less of a presence this time, but still chilling.
By the time the movie reaches its conclusion, everything comes together in a messy but ambitious way, where the action is big, the stakes are clear, and the emotional threads pay off, at least partially anyway, and while I can’t say I loved the ending, as it leans a bit too heavily on spectacle, I appreciated what it was trying to do, and it felt like Derrickson and Cargill wanted to close the story on a note of hope, even if the road there was rough.
In the end, Black Phone 2 isn’t as tightly made or as emotionally sharp as the first film, but it’s a worthy continuation, and I admired its willingness to take risks, even when they didn’t all land.
It’s a story about siblings trying to heal, about how faith can both comfort and confuse, and about the way trauma shapes who we become, and while I might not have loved every creative choice, but I can’t deny I was drawn in by the heart behind it.